☀️ HBO’s Skydance Spree: 7 Projects, 1 Month

Mornin! Here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026.

Where having a World Series game that finishes after 12:30 a.m. ET (or at least that’s when I threw in the towel last night) reminds me of a time when sports would sometimes end too late for the score / recap to make the morning (printed) papers the next day.

Kids, you’ll never know the joy of waiting for the local TV news break in the morning to find out who won the game last night!

But onto Game 5 tonight on FOX . . . as the RAYS finally pulled one out in 12 innings, 4-3 (if only we had newsletters in 1985!).

OH: World Series Game 2 got 10.9M viewers in prelim NIELSEN numbers across FOX and UNIVISION (no breakout for either), down from 11.6M for last year’s Game 2 — but certainly far better than fears going into the series with the smaller market teams.

• Your closest entertainment event comp is probably the Golden Globes, but it’s not that close at 8.7M.
• The Milwaukee market once again got over a 70 share (71). From the crowd-cheering sounds last night in Tampa, I think the other 29% of Milwaukee residents were in Florida for the game.

PLUS: The WNBA got 1.7M viewers on NBC Saturday afternoon for Game 4 of its Finals up against college football. This is the biggest WNBA Finals Game 4 audience ever, if you add the 230k viewers on PEACOCK from ADOBE ANALYTICS.

• I still haven’t NIELSEN streaming numbers yet (which is what advertisers buy).
• Your 4 games so far:
  • 2.1M (NBC), 1.3M (cable), 1.7M (cable), 1.9M (NBC), although all games also streamed on PEACOCK.
  • Note that the NBC games were both on weekends . . . but also note that the cable TV games aired on multiple VERSANT networks.

AND: Here are your Gotham Award nominations.

GOOD NEWS: All that money you’re overpaying for KNICKS tickets goes to a good cause — if you think giving James Dolan another $10M for splitting his company is a worthy use of the money.

OH: Your latest Trump-induced America brain (and revenue) drain — applicants for 2028 MBA programs are currently -27% YoY thanks to international applications tanking at -38% YoY.

THEN: MBA applications aren’t the only thing Trump 2.0 has tanked — here’s how mid-term election season is affecting the (largely) over-65 crowd in cable TV news viewership according to NIELSEN primetime numbers for October obtained by Status (more data, including full-day numbers, is in the link):

• FOX NEWS: 2M (-28% YoY)
  • 183k are 25-54 (or less than 10% of the total audience), which is -36% YoY
• MS NOW: 1.2M (+15% YoY)
• CNN: 644k (+16% YoY)

ALSO: DIS+ and the U.K.’s CHANNEL 4 struck a distro deal, putting the CHANNEL 4 live feed available to watch in DIS+ UK/IRE (à la NETFLIX and TF1 in France), as well as a large streaming licensing deal for CHANNEL 4 series on DIS+ at the same time they air on the network. No word on the financial details.

AS ALWAYS:

Get in touch with me anytime off the record at seanmcnultynyc@gmail.com anytime or on LINKEDIN here.

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